Survivors of myocardial infarction (MI) are at significant risk of heart dysfunction/failure resulting from myocardial remodeling resulting from the MI. This remodeling is associated with poor long-term prognosis, with patients with post-MI congestive heart failure reportedly at a 10-fold higher risk of death as shown in a 5 year follow up study. Treatment of myocardial infarction has concentrated on reducing the period of ischemia and minimizing injury that occurs during post-ischemic reperfusion. Thus, many therapies have aimed to reduce the size of the heart infarct as much as possible or to prevent its occurrence altogether. Recently, deliberate and transient ischemic pre-conditioning has been proposed in order to reduce the effects of ischemic heart injury such as occurs with MI. It has been postulated that this pre-conditioning may essentially induce tolerance in the heart tissue to a later ischemic event such as MI, by reducing the infarct size and thus resulting in a better prognosis.